Mr. Speaker, the motion that has been brought forward by my hon. colleague for Barrie South—Innisfil, who serves as the chair on the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, is important.
Having served on this committee over the past few Parliaments, I have had the opportunity to work with the member for Barrie South—Innisfil and to see him bring the serious approach that is necessary when we are dealing with matters that fall under the purview of this committee. This is a prime example of the important work that this committee can do. With members of opposition parties carrying a majority of votes on this committee, it presents an opportunity for this standing committee to examine, challenge and test the rules and legislation as they pertain to issues that strike at the heart of what has undermined Canadians' confidence in our democratic institutions over the last few years.
We have seen the Conflict of Interest Act, a law, not being well respected by the Liberal government over the past 10 years, with members of the current cabinet found to have broken that law and former prime minister Trudeau found to have broken that law five times. This is a concern for Canadians. Now we are reviewing this act in the context of a Prime Minister who has 103 potential conflicts that have to be managed. What does that mean and what does that look like? How is that process being used to enhance and protect the confidence that Canadians are supposed to be able to have in their executive and in elected officials?
Right now, with those conflicts of interest, there are screens in place, which means that there are issues that are not to be raised at the cabinet table when the Prime Minister is in the room. There are 103 issues. Based on his work as chair at Brookfield, they touch on things that we would expect are important for the Prime Minister to be at the table for: telecommunications, infrastructure, military. I would say that the screen, this protection, is not for the Prime Minister but for Canadians. The intent here should be that we protect Canadians from public office holders, from ministers, in this case the Prime Minister, and his being involved in discussions and taking decisions that would improve his finances and that he could financially benefit from. However, the people who administer that also work for him. It is the Clerk of the Privy Council and the chief of staff to the Prime Minister.
We had the former clerk of the Privy Council testify at committee. The challenge I would raise today is that for the former prime minister, Mr. Trudeau, it was when Mr. Wernick was the clerk that the five occurrences in which the Conflict of Interest Act was broken by the prime minister took place. What was the efficacy of this system? I would say it did not work; it was very poor. Is this something that needs to be changed? This is what the committee is considering, of course.
The question of whether or not, as the act defines it, divesting funds is sufficient is also very important. We had another witness at committee, a former chief of staff to former prime minister Harper, who agreed with the suggestion that divestiture should mean it is actually divested, not placed into a blind trust, but sold.
There are conflicts that continue to exist with the current Prime Minister. He set up all kinds of funds when he worked at Brookfield and has invested in those funds, but the pieces of those funds are not clear to the public. It is very opaque. Does he continue to hold, through that blind trust, investments in tax havens? We do not know. Should a prime minister have investments in tax havens? I would say no. They should be paying taxes as everyone else does, not using the accounting tricks the wealthy rely on to avoid paying their fair share. We expect, at a minimum, that the Prime Minister is going to pay his fair share of taxes.
Therefore, we expect we are going to be able to get some transparency through the reporting process. Right now, we do not get that. Should “divest” mean that one instead sells those controlled assets, not one's real estate, not one's home, and then has the investing process carried out by a manager who would operate blind with a direction from the Prime Minister?
We heard from the current Ethics Commissioner that when funds go into a blind trust, there is not a lot of turnover, churn or trading that takes place, and they often come back out the other side in the same form. The composition of the trust is the same. However, I think we would find, if we looked at the performance of the investments made by the Prime Minister that he set up immediately before taking office and then placed into the trust to be managed by someone else, that the only people who are blind to the full composition of the trust are Canadians. The Prime Minister knows what went in and what is going to come out and, based on the decisions he makes, the value is going to increase. His decisions are only to be stopped, if at all, by his two employees. These are the things we need to study. We need to get better visibility on who is managing it and how it is being managed.
For these reasons, and others that I cannot get into at great length at this moment but would like to see the committee examine, I am going to move an amendment to the motion.
I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: “the third report of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, presented on Monday, September 22, 2025, be not now concurred in, but that it be recommitted to the committee for further consideration, with a view to assessing whether the scope of the review of the Conflict of Interest Act proposed by the committee should be amended in order to address better the concerns posed by the unprecedented extent of the Prime Minister's corporate and shareholding interests, provided that, for the purposes of this order of reference,
(a) the following be ordered to appear as witnesses, separately, for at least two hours each, at dates and times to be fixed by the Chair of the Committee, but no later than Friday, November 21, 2025:
(i) Michael Sabia, Clerk of the Privy Council and an administrator of the Prime Minister's conflict of interest screen,
(ii) Marc-Andre Blanchard, Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister and an administrator of the Prime Minister's conflict of interest screen,
(iii) Bruce Flatt, Chief Executive Officer of Brookfield Corporation and the Prime Minister's immediate successor as Chair of the Board of Directors of Brookfield Asset Management Inc., and
(iv) Connor Teskey, President of Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and Chief Executive Officer of Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P.; and
(b) it be an instruction that the committee report back to the House by Friday, November 28, 2025.
The amendment is seconded by the hon. member for St. Albert—Sturgeon River, which is ably represented by the member.